Eco Voice Q & A: Jenna Leiner, Sustainability Lead at AWS, Asia Pacific (APAC).

Jenna Leiner, Sustainability Lead at AWS, Asia Pacific (APAC).

Background

Jenna is part of the Amazon Web Services Global Sustainability team. Her team develops and executes programs to integrate environmental sustainability into AWS’s global infrastructure and operations, partnering with engineering and operations teams. Jenna leads sustainability programs to help AWS customers across the APAC achieve their sustainability goals, including leveraging AWS services to accelerate sustainability innovation. Jenna has business degree from Queensland University of Technology and is a member of Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand.

Wandoan Solar Farm

To provide insights into the role tech companies can play in Australia’s transition to renewable energy, Tim Langdon, publisher of Eco Voice, had the pleasure of facilitating a Q & A with Jenna Leiner, Sustainability Lead at AWS, Asia Pacific (APAC).

Q1. What are smart energy meters?

According to the Australian Energy Council, smart meters – also called advanced or digital meters – provide real-time electricity information between a customer and an electricity business, and can give energy customers more options on how they use and manage their electricity consumption.

Q2. Why are smart energy meters important in the transition to renewable energy and decarbonisation?

Smart energy meters are a great example of the power of detailed, real-time information in the energy transition. Consumers can use this information to make more informed decisions on when they choose to use energy, opting to use less energy during peak periods when it may be cheaper. As more consumers turn to solar, battery-powered and electric vehicles, energy companies also need this information to understand this evolving behaviour and plan the power supply for the network. Energy companies are just beginning to leverage the potential of smart energy meter information, by moving data from inside on-premises systems to the cloud, and for more than just billing.

Q3. How important is technology more generally in the transition to renewable energy and decarbonisation?

As we move away from traditional electricity meters which captured monthly energy consumption to more detailed, real-time consumption available from smart energy meters, the amount of data available could be over-whelming. Digital technologies and cloud services can help organisations extract intelligent insights from this data. For example, Vector Technology Solutions (VTS), a subsidiary of New Zealand energy provider Vector, builds innovation technologies to accelerate decarbonisation. Their data and analytics platform, Diverge, is built on AWS and is being used by more than 1 million smart energy meters in Australia and New Zealand. Diverge processes high-frequency data from smart electricity and gas meters installed in homes and businesses, so energy companies can better understand energy supply and demand from across the grid, and the impact of distributed energy resources, like solar, batteries, or electric vehicle chargers.

Increasingly, customers are finding value at the intersection of digital technologies and sustainability. According to Accenture, tomorrow’s “Twin Transformers” are 2.5x more likely to outperform their peers. Innovation is key to achieving sustainability goals—challenges such as decarbonisation of operations to water conservation are addressed through technologies that drive sustainable transformation. AWS enables customers to build sustainability solutions ranging from carbon tracking to energy conservation to waste reduction, using AWS services to ingest, analyse, and manage sustainability data.

Q4. Is innovation important to AWS?

Every new idea we’ve brought to life, from founding AWS to designing our own chip technology, to our long history of developing artificial intelligence (AI) services, and developing Just Walk Out retail technology, was born of mechanisms and mental models we’ve designed to promote customer-centric experimentation across our organisation. This approach reflects our culture of innovation, and working backwards methodology which puts the customer at the center of everything we do and assigns responsibility for innovation to every Amazon employee.

Increasing the speed and volume of innovation has become a business imperative. We talk with AWS customers every day who want to create new growth opportunities, customer experiences, and paths to greater efficiency—and they want to do it fast. The reason for their sense of urgency is simple: regardless of economic climate, smart innovation investments can create and maintain differentiation. For example, Australian start-up and AWS customer Brighte has a mission to make buying sustainable energy solutions easier and more affordable for homeowners. By leveraging AWS technologies and AWS solution architects, the Brighte team could quickly build and test new ideas as they work towards that mission.

Q5. How does AWS protect the data that it collects from its customers?

Earning customer trust is the foundation of our business at AWS and we know our customers trust us to protect their most critical and sensitive assets: their data. We earn this trust by working closely with customers to understand their data protection needs, and by offering the most comprehensive set of services, tooling, and expertise to help customers protect their data. To do this, we provide technical, operational, and contractual measures needed to protect customer data. With AWS, customers manage the privacy controls of their data, control how their data is used, who has access to it, and how it is encrypted. We underpin these capabilities with the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today.

ABOUT ECO VOICE

First published in 2003, Eco Voice is your go-to publication for sustainability news in Australia. Eco Voice prides itself as an independent news platform with a clear focus on sustainability, with articles coming from a diverse range of contributors – all levels of government, corporations, not-for-profits, community groups, small to medium sized businesses, universities, research organisations, together with input from international sources. Eco Voice values community, conservation and commerce. Eco Voice is a media partner of the prestigious Australian Banksia Sustainability Awards – The Peak Sustainability Awards.

ABOUT AMAZON WEB SERVICES

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.